The only actual evidence for the belief in drug-induced addiction comes 1) from the testimonials of some addicted people who believe that exposure to a drug caused them to “lose control” and 2) from some highly technical research on laboratory animals. These bits of evidence have been embellished in the news media to the point where the belief in drug-induced addiction has acquired the status of an obvious truth that requires no further testing. But the widespread acceptance of this belief is a better demonstration of the power of repetition than of the influence of empirical research, because the great bulk of empirical evidence runs against it.

Albino rats served as subjects and morphine hydrochloride, which is equivalent to heroin, as the experimental drug. Laboratory rats are gregarious, curious, active creatures. Their ancestors, wild Norway rats, are intensely social and hundreds of generations of laboratory breeding have left many social instincts intact. Therefore, it is conceivable that the self-medication hypothesis might provide the most parsimonious explanation for the self-administration of powerful drugs by rats that were raised in isolated metal cages and subjected to surgical implantations in the hands of a eager (but seldom skillful) graduate student followed by being tethered in a self-injection apparatus. The results of self-injection experiments would not show that claim B was true so much as that severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.

My colleagues at Simon Fraser University and I built the most natural environment for rats that we could contrive in the laboratory. “Rat Park”, as it came to be called, was airy and spacious, with about 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. It was also scenic, (with a peaceful British Columbia forest painted on the plywood walls), comfortable (with empty tins, wood scraps, and other desiderata strewn about on the floor), and sociable (with 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence at once).

In the rat cages, the rats’ appetite for morphine was measured by fastening two drinking bottles, one containing a morphine solution and one containing water, on each cage and weighing them daily. In Rat Park, measurement of individual drug consumption was more difficult, since we did not want to disrupt life in the presumably idyllic rodent community. We built a short tunnel opening into Rat Park that was just large enough to accommodate one rat at a time. At the far end of the tunnel, the rats could release a fluid from either of two drop dispensers. One dispenser contained a morphine solution and the other an inert solution. The dispenser recorded how much each rat drank of each fluid.

A number of experiments were performed in this way (for a more detailed summary, see Alexander et al., 1985), all of which indicated that rats living in Rat Park had little appetite for morphine. In some experiments, we forced the rats to consume morphine for weeks before allowing them to choose, so that there could be no doubt that they had developed strong withdrawal symptoms. In other experiments, I made the morphine solution so sickeningly sweet that no rat could resist trying it, but we always found less appetite for morphine in the animals housed in Rat Park. Under some conditions the animals in the cages consumed nearly 20 times as much morphine as the rats in Rat Park. Nothing that we tried instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.

There was a time when society spoke with unshakable certainty of the terrifying dangers that resulted from even a word of religious heresy and of the incurable consequences of occasional childhood masturbation. At the time, terrifying rhetoric seemed necessary to frighten people away from socially unacceptable behaviours. But the consequences were brutal. Moreover, the scare tactics eventually lost their power anyway. Much the same seems to be occurring now, as both the brutality and the futility of the “War on Drugs” are becoming more and more evident. There are times in history when society is better served by dispassionate information than by manufactured fear.

My hope is that this quick survey of the illusory scientific support for the conventional belief that heroin and cocaine cause addiction can help to show why society should turn away from this unsupported belief. Understanding that there may not be any inherent addictive power in drugs could help to turn us toward a broader, more efficacious formulation of the causes of addiction in our time, and of the huge, dismal saga of tragedy that it produces.

The Myth of Drug-Induced Addiction, Bruce K. Alexander, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Committee/371/ille/presentation/alexender-e.htm.

Normally, intelligence and education are aides to acquiring true beliefs. But when an individual has non-epistemic belief preferences, this need not be the case; high intelligence and extensive knowledge of a subject may even worsen an individual’s prospects for obtaining a true belief. The reason is that a biased person uses his intelligence and education as tools for rationalizing beliefs. Highly intelligent people can think of rationalizations for their beliefs in situations in which the less intelligent would be forced to give up and concede error, and highly educated people have larger stores of information from which to selectively search for information supporting a desired belief. Thus, it is nearly impossible to change an academic’s mind about anything important, particularly in his own field of study. This is particularly true of philosophers (my own occupation), who are experts at argumentation.

Why People Are Irrational about Politics, Dr. Michael Huemer, University of Colorado, http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm.

One can choose not to pay a fine, one can choose to drive without a license, and one can even choose not to walk to a police car to be taken away. But one cannot choose not to be subjected to physical force if the agents of the state decide to impose it.

Thus, a crucial element of the legal system–in a sense, the basis of the legal system–is intentional, harmful coercion. To justify a law, one must justify imposition of that law on the population through a threat of harm, including the coercive imposition of actual harm on those who are caught violating the law. In common sense morality, the threat or actual coercive imposition of harm is normally wrong, other things being equal, and such actions require a special justification. This may be because of the way in which coercion disrespects persons, seeking to bypass their reason and manipulate them through fear, or the way in which it seems to deny the autonomy and equality of other persons.

The central concern is the evaluation of our moral attitudes toward government: Are governments really ethically entitled to do the things we usually take them to be entitled to do? Are we really ethically obligated to obey governments in the ways we usually take ourselves to be obligated?

Questions of this kind are notoriously difficult. How should we approach them? One approach would be to start from some comprehensive moral theory–say, utilitarianism, or Kantian deontology–and attempt to deduce from the theory the appropriate conclusions about political rights and obligations. I, unfortunately, cannot do this. I cannot do it because I do not know the correct general moral theory, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The reasons for my skepticism are difficult to communicate and will not be adequately communicated here. They derive from reflection on the problems of moral philosophy and on the complex, confusing, and constantly disputed literature about those problems. They derive from the experience of seeing one theory after another run into a morass of puzzles and problems, and seeing this morass become ever more complicated as more philosophers work on it. I do not see any way to bring a reader to the state of skepticism about moral theory that I consider appropriate, apart from asking the reader to delve into that literature himself. Here, then, I shall simply announce that I will not assume any comprehensive moral theory, and I think we should be very skeptical of any attempt to arrive at sound conclusions in political philosophy by starting from such a general theory. Nor, for similar reasons, do I start by assuming any general political theory (though I hope to arrive at a political theory in the end).

What is the alternative? I aim to start from moral claims that are, initially, relatively uncontroversial. This seems an obvious plan. Political philosophy is a difficult field. If we hope to make progress, we cannot start reasoning from a contentious moral theory; still less can we begin by assuming a contentious political ideology. Our premises should be things that, for example, both liberals and conservatives would typically find obvious at first glance. We must then attempt to reason from these premises to conclusions about the contested questions that interest us. The process will no doubt be more difficult and more involved than this simple description makes it sound; nevertheless, surely this is the correct general approach. Yet, natural as it may seem, this approach is seldom taken up.

Some philosophers believe that in doing moral philosophy, one should rely only upon abstract ethical principles, refusing to trust intuitive ethical judgments about specific cases. Others believe, more or less, that only judgments about particular cases should be relied upon. Still others think that no ethical judgments can be relied upon, and that there is no moral knowledge. All of those views strike me as wrong. What seems right is that controversial ethical judgments tend to be unreliable, whereas obvious, uncontroversial ethical judgments–whether specific or general–tend to be reliable. As to those who believe there is no moral knowledge, I cannot take time to address their position in this book; for present purposes, I shall assume that we have moral knowledge, and that our clearest, most widely-shared ethical judgments are instances of such knowledge.

In contemporary political discourse, there is a vocal minority who advocate drastic reductions in the size of government. Often, they defend their views in practical terms (government programs don’t work) or in terms of absolutist claims about individual rights. But these arguments are not the main issue. I believe the true, underlying motivation is a broad skepticism about political authority: at bottom, the advocates of smaller government simply do not see why the government should be permitted to do things that no one else would be permitted to do. Even if you do not share this skeptical attitude, I would caution against simply dismissing the intuitions of those with differing ideologies. Human beings are highly fallible in political philosophy, and clashes of intuitions are frequent. If we wish to be objective, we must each give serious consideration to the possibility that it is we who have the mistaken intuitions.

My political philosophy is a form of anarchism. In my experience, most people appear to be convinced that anarchism is obvious nonsense, an idea that can be refuted inside of 30 seconds with minimal reflection. This was roughly my attitude, before I knew anything about the theory. And it is also my experience that those who harbor this attitude have no idea what anarchists actually think–how anarchists think society should function or how they respond to the 30-second objections. Anarchists face a catch-22: most people will not give anarchists a serious hearing, because they are convinced at the start that the position is crazy; they are convinced that the position is crazy, because they do not understand it; and they do not understand it, because they will not give it a serious hearing. I therefore ask the reader not to give up reading this book merely because of its conclusion. The author is neither stupid, nor crazy, nor evil; he has a reasoned account of how a stateless society might function. I cannot promise that you will find the account ultimately convincing. But it is very likely that you will find it to have been worth considering.

First Chapter of Upcoming Book, Dr. Michael Huemer, University of Colorado, http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf.

As long ago as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government complaint that the ordinary people had become literate… Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public’s reading and writing abilities. Yet despite this obstacle, by the time government came round to subsidising on a tiny scale in the 1830s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the people (according to one modern specialist– see p. 164) were already literate… Moreover, the effects of the subsidies to schools were probably more than offset, in the early years at least, by the continuation of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, i.e. the enormous taxes on paper, newspapers, and pamphlets which were not removed until the 1850s and 1860s… The notion held by many people that had it not been for the state they or at least most of their neighbours would never have become educated is a striking monument to the belief of the Victorian lawyer, Dicey, that people’s opinions and convictions eventually become conditioned by the legislated institutions they make themselves.

In the more formal or statistical evidence of literacy in the nineteenth century, the first thing that stands out is the consistency of its testimony that the ability to read was always in advance of the ability to write… and this reflected the relative contemporary demand. Ordinary people wanted to read in order to enjoy… magazines and newspapers, whereas they did not have quite the same need for writing and writing materials were expensive because of taxes upon them.

[Of pauper children] in Suffolk and Norfolk [in 1838], 87 percent could already read to some extent… a smaller proportion of them could write but even this was 53 percent. It is interesting to compare this evidence with the extent of literacy as measured by UNESCO in some countries in 1950: Portagal 55-60 percent, Egypt 20-25 percent, Algeria 15-20 percent. The UNESCO figures are percentages of the adult population, whereas the English example refers only to pauper children between 9 and 16 years.

An estimate of literacy among miners in in 1840 [in Northumberland and Durham]… show that 79 percent of these miners were already able to read; also more than half of them had learned to write… largely independent of state help which started in 1833.

The Reports from the Assistant Handloom Weavers’ Commissioners in 1839 indicated that handloom weavers were even more advanced. For instance, according to one inspector only 15 of 195 adults in Gloucestershire could neither read nor write. A special survey of the reading and writing abilities of the people of Hull in 1839 found that of the 14,526 adults, 14,109 had attended day or evening school and that only 1,054 of them could not read; in other words over 92 percent could read.

The statistics of literacy… [showed] a remarkable consistency between all the various surveys in different parts of the country and by different types of investigators. Second, there is evidence that the education inspectors who made some of the tests were so demanding that their figures were, if anything, underestimates.

If at least two-thirds of the working classes were literate round about 1840, how far are we to attribute the improvement of the remaining third to government intervention from that time down to 1870? … As late as 1869, two-thirds of school expenditure was still coming from voluntary sources, especially from the parents, directly or indirectly. Even the state subsidies were derived from a tax system which was largely repressive… three-fifths of taxation fell on food and tobacco… so it is not easy to demonstrate that had the state not raised the money through taxation to subsidise the schools the total expenditure on them would have been lower.

If most people were already literate in 1870, by what means was such a feat accomplished? … The first comprehensive official statistic on schooling were provided by Henry Brougham’s Select Committee in 1820. It stated that in 1818 about 1 in 14 or 15 of the population was being schooled… In 1828 Brougham… was astonished when his findings indicated that the number of children in schools had doubled in ten years.

Who then paid for the pre-state education? It is common to point to philanthropy and the Church. But to dwell on these sources is to conceal the part played by the ordinary people themselves. If we are to believe the evidence of Henry Brougham most parents bought education by modest fee-paying.

The evidence shows that the number of years of voluntary schooling was indeed growing with those gradual increases in incomes that came with the economic growth of the nineteenth century.

Professor George J. Sitgler, who measured the kind of education which leads to increases in income-earning power of the individual, concluded that in 1940 as much as two-thirds of it was acquired not in colleges or schools by but experience and instruction within the [workplace].

The case of food is interesting. Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes and rates in order to provide children’s food ‘free’ at local authority kitchens or shops… Protection against the supply of adultered food to children (or to anybody else) is effected simply by a system of inspection, reinforced by regulations, breaches of which are punishable by law… It is still more difficult to imagine that most people would unquestionably accept this system, especially where it had developed to the stage that for ‘administrative reasons’ parents were allocated those shops which happened to be nearest their homes; or that any complaint or special desire to change their pre-selected shops should be dealt with by special and quasi-judicial enquiry after a formal appointment with the local ‘Child Food Officer’ or, failing this, by pressure upon their respective representatives on the local ‘Child Food Committee’ or upon their local M.P. Yet strange as such hypothetical measures may appear when applied to the provision of food and clothing, they are typical of English state education as it has evolved.

Presumably it is recognised that the ability in a free market to change one’s food shop when it threatens to become, or has become, inefficient is an effective instrument whereby parents can protect their children from inferior service in a prompt and effective manner. If this is so, then one should expect that the same arguments of protection would in this respect point in the direction not of a free school system where it is normally difficult to change one’s ‘supplier’ but in the direction of fee-paying where it is easier… Voting in the market… is a process whereby the wishes of the parent are immediately and more continually expressed, for the market mechanism is, in the words of Lord Robbins, ‘a continuous general election on the principle of proportionate representation.’ Second, the political process allows advantages to those who can organise themselves more readily into pressure groups; and because parents are less easily organisable in the political sense than others, much of their bargaining power is reduced. Third, voting through the ballot box is much less discriminating since it is less able to avoid the necessity of large ‘package deals.’ For instance, the selection of a local councillor involves voting not only for what he is expected to do in education but also for his policy in housing, roads, health, sewage, etc. In contrast, the fee-paying system… nicely discriminated not only between schools or schoolmasters but also between subjects.

Present-day statistical evidence… shows that crime has increased at the same time as state education has been growing. Certainly this does not deny that crime could have grown equally or even more in the absence of state education. But scientific objectivity demands that all things should be suspect, especially where there is a positive correlation… The Crowther Committee found… that the last year of compulsory education was also the heaviest year for juvenile delinquency and that the tendency to crime during school years was reversed when a boy went to work. Not only was this a long-standing phenomenon but also when in 1947 the school leaving age was raised from 14 to 15… there was an immediate change over in the delinquency record of the 13-year olds and the 14-year olds… [one] could argue, but with less certainty, that the evidence shows a prima facie relationship in the opposite direction, i.e. that state education involved adverse external effects and aggravated or even helped to cause the prevailing trend towards increased criminal behaviour.

[In nineteenth century America,] New York State was chosen for study… For instance, in 1830 parental fees contributes $346,807 toward the total sum for teachers’ wages of $586,520… In the first half of the century figures of private schooling throughout the State were hard to come by. But it will be observed that the 1811 Commissioners observed that in thickly populated areas the means of education were already provided for… The Superintendant’s Report of 1830… of the city of New York… showed that of the 24,952 children attending school in the city, the great majority, 18,945 were in private schools… In the report of 1821 it was stated that the whole number of children between the ages of five and sixteen residing in the State was 380,000; and the total number of all ages taught during the year was 342,479. Thus, according to this evidence, schooling in the early nineteenth century was already almost universal without being compulsory… The Superintendant of the State himself… conceded in his annual report dated 1871 that it was rarely the case that ‘parents who provide for their children in other respects, wholly neglect their education.”

I reached the conclusion that on a reasonable assessment of the evidence, the behaviour of most families in the nineteenth century seems to have been much more commendable than we have often been led to suspect. What is more, it seems to have been improving with experience and with the growth of private incomes. The exceptions to this rule are always in danger of receiving such a disproportionate amount of public attention that the unwary are constantly in danger of being blinded by them. The widely read Dickensian caricatures of some nineteenth-century families, for instance, may be rich in literary appeal but in them lies the danger that they may too easily be taken as dispassionate and representative social commentary.

Gladstone warned [in 1856]: “It appears to me clear that the day you sanction compulsory rating for the purpose of education you sign the death-warrant of voluntary exertions… are we preparing to undergo the risk of extinguishing that vast amount of voluntary effort which now exists throughout the country? Aid it you may, strengthen, and invigorate, and enlarge it you may; you may have done so to an extraordinary degree; you have every encouragement to persevere in the same course; but always recollect that you depend upon influences of which you get the benefit, but which are not at your command– influences which you may, perchance, in an unhappy day, extinguish, but which you can never create.”

One would like to know how [to] allocate the credit for the most striking of all English industrial advances in the late eighteenth century which occurred despite the complete indifference of English universities and the entire absence of state education… For McCulloch argued that the economic superiority of Britain over Prussia and France was precisely due to the relative failure of their education, and it was in these very countries that centrally administered school systems did exist. Britain, on the contrary, relied on a privately supplied education.

Education and the State, E. G. West, 1965, http://www.amazon.com/Education-State-G-West/dp/0865971358/.

Altogether, my teams tested 24,000 [of the poorest] children. We started in India and moved on to Nigeria, then Ghana, then back to India, then on to rural China… On all the indicators explored, government schools, in general, performed worse than both recognized and unrecognized private schools… Class sizes were smaller in both types of private schools than in public schools. Both types of private schools had a higher… percentage of teachers teaching when our researchers called unannounced. Only on one quality input — the provision of playgrounds — were government schools superior… Children in both types of private schools in general scored higher on standardized tests in key curriculum subjects than did children in government schools. This remained true even when we controlled for an array of background variables, to account for differences between children in public and private schools. The higher standards in private schools were usually maintained for a small fraction of the per-pupil teacher cost in government schools… No wealthy outside agencies were assisting them. Even so, often they do better… Government school teachers were paid considerably more than private school teachers– up to seven times more.

I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.

Mahatma Gandhi, Chatham House, London, October 20, 1931.

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, James Tooley, 2009, http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1933995920.

Homeschooling grew from nearly nonexistent in the 1970s to roughly two million students in grades K to 12 by 2009… Numerous studies by dozens of researchers have been completed during the past 25 years that examine the academic achievement of the home-educated (see reviews, e.g., Ray, 2000, 2005; 2009b). Examples of these studies range from a multi-year study in Washington State (Wartes, 1991), to other state-specific studies, to three nationwide studies across the United States (Ray, 1990, 1997, 2000; Rudner 1999), to two nationwide studies in Canada (Ray, 1994; Van Pelt, 2003). In most studies, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests, compared to the national school average of the 50th percentile (which is largely based on public schools). A few studies have found the home educated to be scoring about the same or a little better than public school students.

Researchers have examined relationships between several variables and homeschool students’ achievement (e.g., Ray, 2000; Ray & Eagleson, 2008; Rudner, 1999). Examples are parent educational attainment, family income, race or ethnicity, number of years the child had been home educated, time spent in formal instruction, and degree of regulation of homeschooling by the state. A few of these variables (e.g., parent education level) are consistently associated with homeschool students’ achievement, although the relationships are often relatively weak. Several variables studied to date show no or very little relationship to these students’ achievement; examples of such variables are the degree of regulation (control) of homeschooling by the state and whether the parents have ever been state-certified teachers.

Research shows that the large majority of home-educated students consistently interact with children of various ages and parents outside their immediate family (see, e.g., Medlin, 2000; Ray, 1997, 2009b).

The second part of the socialization question asks whether home-educated children will experience healthy social, emotional, and psychological development. Numerous studies, employing various psychological constructs and measures, show the home-educated are developing at least as well, and often better than, those who attend institutional schools (Medlin, 2000; Ray, 2009b). No research to date contravenes this general conclusion.

It appears that the home educated are engaged, at least as much as are others, in activities that predict leadership in adulthood (Montgomery, 1989), doing well on their college/university SAT tests (Barber, 2001, personal communication) and ACT tests (ACT, 2005), matriculating in college at a rate that is comparable or a bit higher than for the general public (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt 2003), performing well in college (Gray, 1998; Galloway & Sutton, 1995; Jenkins, 1998; Jones & Gloeckner, 2004; Mexcur, 1993; Oliveira, Watson, & Sutton, 1994), satisfied that they were home educated (Knowles & Muchmore, 1995; Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009), involved in community service at least as much as others (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009), and more civically engaged than the general public (Ray, 2004; Van Pelt, Neven, & Allison, 2009). There is no research evidence that having been home educated is associated with negative behaviors or ineptitudes in adulthood.

Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study, Academic Leadership Journal, 2010, http://www.academicleadership.org/392/academic_achievement_and_demographic_traits_of_homeschool_students_a_nationwide_study/.

Census Bureau Reports Public School Systems Spend $10,499 Per Pupil in 2009

In the study, there was an only slight relationship between the yearly cost of education (including textbooks, other teaching materials, tutoring, enrichment services, counseling, testing, and evaluation) and homeschooled student test scores. The median amount spent per child each year was $400–599.

Homeschoolers’ median family income ($75,000–79,999) closely spanned the nationwide median (about $79,000) for families headed by a married couple and with one or more related children under 18.

Homeschool Progress Report 2009, Home School Legal Defense Association, http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/ray2009/2009_Ray_StudyFINAL.pdf.

We are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation, to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences… The danger of the job is a constant theme in the defense of police violence… Between 1995 and 2000, 360 cops were murdered and 403 died in [car] accidents… Naturally it is not to be lost sight of that these numbers represent human lives, not widgets or sacks of potatoes. But let’s remember that there were 5,915 fatal work injuries in 2000… Policing may be dangerous, but it is not the most dangerous job available. In terms of total fatalities, more truck drivers are killed than any other kind of worker… A better measure of occupational risk, however, is the rate of work-related deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2000, for example, it was 27.6 for truck drivers. At 12.1 deaths per 100,000, policing is slightly less dangerous than mowing lawns, cutting hedges, and running a wood-chipper: groundskeepers suffer 14.9 deaths per 100,000. By occupation, the highest rate of fatalities is among timber cutters, at 122.1 per 100,000. By industry, mining and farming are the most dangerous.

Where are all the headlines, the memorials, the honour guards, and the sorrowful renderings of taps for these workers? Where are the mayoral speeches, the newspaper editorials, the sober reflections that these brave men and women died, and that others risk their lives daily, so that we might continue to enjoy the benefits of modern society? Policing, it seems, is the only industry that both exaggerates and advertises its dangers… The exaggerated sense of danger has helped to re-order police priorities, to the detriment of the public interest. [Rodney] Stark argues that, “the police ought to understand clearly that they are being paid to take a certain degree of risk and that their safety does not come before public safety or the common good. Unfortunately, the police typically place their safety first and in recent years we have come to accept this priority.”

All together, 1,820 law enforcement officers were murdered during the… period between 1976 and 1998. In the same time, the police killed 8,578 people, averaging 373 annually– more than one a day. If we do the math, we see that police kill almost five times as often as they are killed.

The study of police brutality faces any number of methodological barriers, not least of which is the problem of defining it. There is no standard definition, nor is there one way of measuring force and excessive force… Even where the facts of a case are agreed upon (which is rare), there may yet be intense disagreement about the relevant standards of conduct and their application to the particular circumstances… Until very recently, nobody even bothered to keep track of how often the police use force… Furthermore, the data on which the studies are based are surely incomplete. Many of the reports rely on local police agencies to supply their numbers, and reporting is voluntary.

According to a 1996 U.S. Justice Department survey, 20 percent of the American public had direct contact with the police during the previous year. Most of these contacts took the form of traffic stops, and most were unremarkable. Only 1 in 500 residents was subject to the use of force or the threat of force… Now, that may not sound like a lot of people, until you realize that “1 in 500″ is a polite way of saying nearly half a million– an estimated 471,000 people in 1996 and 422,000 in 1999.

More than three quarters of the victims (76 percent) characterized the force as excessive, and the vast majority (92 percent) of persons experiencing [the] threat or use of force said the police acted improperly… In 1999, for example, 86.9 percent of the victims of police violence were male, and 55.3 percent were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. While most victims were White (58.9 percent), Black people and Latinos were victimized in numbers significantly out of proportion to their representation in the general population… Of those killed by police from 1976 to 1998, 42 percent were Black.

According to a Justice Department study of six police agencies, police use force in 17.1 percent of all adult custody arrests… Suspects, in contrast, use force against the police in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

Of course, the propensity for violence is not distributed evenly throughout police departments. The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (also called the Christopher Commission) noted… “The top 5 percent of officers ranked by number of reports accounted for more than 20 percent of all reports, and the top 10 percent accounted for 33 percent.” … One retired LAPD sergeant told the Christopher Commission that there were at least one or two cops in every division who regularly use excessive force. This would imply that not only is brutality routine, it is widespread.

Even where officers are found guilty of misconduct, discipline rarely follows. For example, in 1998 New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board issued 300 findings against officers; fewer than half of these resulted in disciplinary action… A National Institute of Justice study on police integrity discovered, “A surprising 61 percent indicated that police officers do not always report even serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers.”

These figures, which I have recited with relatively little comment… seem altogether too sanitized. They should, to do the subject justice, come smeared with blood, with numbers surrounded by chalk outlines. The real cost of police violence, the human cost, is too easily forgotten, figured away, buried under a mountain of decimal points.

Police activities, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent, tend to keep the people who currently stand at the bottom of the social hierarchy in their “place,” where they “belong”– at the bottom… Put differently, we might say that the police act to defend the interests and standing of those with power– those at the top… Police brutality is pervasive, systemic, and inherent to the institution.

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, Kristian Williams, 2007, http://www.amazon.com/Our-Enemies-Blue-America-Revised/dp/0896087719.

Just one of countless examples of police brutality:

Otto Zehm, a mentally handicapped, 36-year-old unemployed janitor, was beaten to death in a Spokane convenience store in March 2006. “All I wanted was a Snickers bar,” pleaded the battered and bloody man before he was gagged by his assailant.

Their Right to Kill, Our Duty To Die: The Murder of Otto Zehm, William N. Grigg, December 22, 2011, http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/12/their-right-to-kill-our-duty-to-die.html.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that the duties of law enforcement may require limited, officially sanctioned deception in the course of criminal investigations. United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 434 (1973): “Criminal activity is such that stealth and strategy are necessary weapons in the arsenal of the police officer.” … The Supreme Court has referred to these sanctioned ruses as “strategic deception.” Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292, 297 (1990).

Training Cops to Lie, Pt 2, Val Van Brocklin, December 21, 2009, http://www.officer.com/article/10233016/training-cops-to-lie-pt-2.

Recent re-examination of the history and meaning of the Fifth Amendment has emphasized anew that one of the basic functions of the privilege is to protect innocent men. Griswold, The Fifth Amendment Today, 9-30, 53-82. “Too many, even those who should be better advised, view this privilege as a shelter for wrongdoers. They too readily assume that those who invoke it are either guilty of crime or commit perjury in claiming the privilege.” Ullmann v. United States, 350 U.S. 422, 426 . See also Slochower v. Board of Higher Education, 350 U.S. 551 , when, at the same Term, this Court said at pp. 557-558: “The privilege serves to protect the innocent who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.”

U.S. Supreme Court, Grunewald v. United States, 353 U. S. 391, 421 (1957), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=353&invol=391&pageno=421.

Any lawyer worth his salt will tell [a] suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, former Attorney General of the United States and Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4060.

… the settled principle that while the police have the right to request citizens to answer voluntarily questions concerning unsolved crimes they have no right to compel them to answer.

U.S. Supreme Court, DAVIS v. MISSISSIPPI, 394 U.S. 721 (1969), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=394&invol=721.

Ordinarily, an investigating officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Amendment. INS v. Delgado, 466 U. S. 210. Beginning with Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, the Court has recognized that an officer’s reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in criminal activity permits the officer to stop the person for a brief time and take additional steps to investigate further. Although it is well established that an officer may ask a suspect to identify himself during a Terry stop, see, e.g., United States v. Hensley, 469 U. S. 221, it has been an open question whether the suspect can be arrested and prosecuted for refusal to answer, see Brown, supra , at 53, n. 3. The Court is now of the view that Terry principles permit a State to require a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a Terry stop. Terry, supra, at 34.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits only compelled testimony that is incriminating, see Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591, and protects only against disclosures that the witness reasonably believes could be used in a criminal prosecution or could lead to other evidence that might be so used, Kastigar v. United States, 406 U. S. 441. Hiibel’s refusal to disclose was not based on any articulated real and appreciable fear that his name would be used to incriminate him, or that it would furnish evidence needed to prosecute him. Hoffman v. United States, 341 U. S. 479. It appears he refused to identify himself only because he thought his name was none of the officer’s business. While the Court recognizes his strong belief that he should not have to disclose his identity, the Fifth Amendment does not override the Nevada Legislature’s judgment to the contrary absent a reasonable belief that the disclosure would tend to incriminate him. Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/03-5554.

Civil rights are fundamental to a free society and to human dignity. Their blatant denial to many, but especially to blacks in the South, was for too long a mockery of American ideals… The poisonous atmosphere surrounding any attempt to debate issues involving race and ethnicity is demonstrated in many ways. In addition to the usual ad hominem attacks and overheated rhetoric, there has also developed a fundamental disregard for the truth.

The historical data show that the economic rise of minorities preceded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by many years, the existing upward trend was not accelerated, either by that Act or by quotas that became generally mandatory in 1971, and during the era of affirmative action, such disadvantaged blacks as young males with little experience or education, and members of female-headed households, actually retrogressed relative to whites of the same description, while more advantaged blacks rose both absolutely and relative to their white counterparts. In short, although affirmative action invokes the name of the disadvantaged, these are precisely the people who have fallen further behind under its auspices.

Much has been made of the number of blacks in high-level occupations before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What has been almost totally ignored is the historical trend of black representation in such occupations before the Act was passed. In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s– when there was little or no civil rights policy– than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.

The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers rose less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years preceding it… Nor did the institution of “goals and timetables” at the end of 1971 mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations.

The history of Asians and Hispanics likewise shows long term upward trends that began years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were not noticeably accelerated by the Act or by later “affirmative action” policies. The income of Mexican Americans rose relative to that of non-Hispanic whites between 1959 and 1969, but no more so than from 1949 to 1959. Chinese and Japanese Americans overtook other Americans in income by 1959– five years before the Civil Rights Act.

What is truly surprising– and relatively ignored– is the economic impact of affirmative action on the disadvantaged, for whom it is most insistently invoked. The relative position of disadvantaged individuals within the groups singled out for preferential treatment has generally declined under affirmative action… In 1969, before the federal imposition of numerical “goals and timetables,” Puerto Rican family income was 63 percent of the national average. By 1977, it was down to 50 percent. In 1969, Mexican American family income was 76 percent of the national average. By 1977, it was down to 73 percent. Black family income fell from 62 percent of the national average to 60 percent over the same span.

There are many complex factors behind these numbers. The point here is simply that they do not support the civil rights vision. A finer breakdown of the data for blacks shows the most disadvantaged families– the female-headed, with no husband present– to be not only the poorest and with the slowest increase in money income during the 1970s but also with money incomes increasing even more slowly than among white, female-headed households… Black faculty members with numerous publications and Ph.D.’s from top-rated institutions earned more than white faculty members with the same high qualifications, but black faculty members who lacked a doctorate or publications earned less than whites with the same low qualifications… The top fifth of blacks have absorbed a growing proportion of all income received by blacks, while each of the bottom three fifths has received declining shares.

None of this is easily reconcilable with the civil rights vision’s all-purpose explanation, racism and discrimination… It is much more reconcilable with ordinary economic analysis. Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers… It is precisely the disadvantaged who suffer from affirmative action.

Groups with a demonstrable history of being discriminated against have, in many countries and in many periods of history, had higher incomes, better educational performance, and more representation in high-level positions than those doing the discriminating. Throughout southeast Asia, for several centuries, the Chinese minority has been– and continues to be– the target of explicit, legalized discrimination… Nowhere in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, or the Philippines have the Chinese ever experienced equal opportunity. Yet in all these countries the Chinese minority– about 5 percent of the population of southeast Asia– owns a majority of the nation’s total investments in key industries… In Malaysia, where the anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay… The number of Chinese killed within a few days, at various times in the history of southeast Asia, has on a number of occasions exceeded all the blacks ever lynched in the history of the United States.

Nor are the Chinese minorities in southeast Asia unique. Much the same story could be told of the Jews in many countries around the world and in many periods of history. A similar pattern could also be found among East Indians in Africa, southeast Asia and parts of the western hemisphere, or among Armenians in the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. Italian immigrants to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also encountered discrimination, but nevertheless rose from poverty to affluence, surpassing the Argentine majority… Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War II, but by 1959 they had about equalled the income of whites and by 1969 Japanese American families were earning nearly one-third higher incomes than the average American family.

In short, two key assumptions behind the civil rights vision do not stand up as general principles. The first is that discrimination leads to poverty and other adverse social consequences, and the second is the converse– that adverse statistical disparities imply discrimination.

One of the most central– and most controversial– premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by “society.” … Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc… A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences… Initially, civil rights meant, quite simply, that all individuals should be treated the same under the law, regardless of their race, religion, sex or other such social categories… later… the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results [affirmative action].

The fatal flaw in this kind of thinking is that there are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and geographically… Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.” … Self-employed farmers, for example, do not depend for their rewards on the biases of employers or the stereotypes of observers. Yet self-employed farmers of different ethnicity have fared very differently on the same land, even in earlier pre-mechanization times, when the principal input was the farmer’s own labour… That Jews earn far higher incomes than Hispanics in the United States might be taken as evidence that anti-Hispanic bias is stronger than anti-Semitism– if one followed the logic of the civil rights vision. But this explanation is considerably weakened by the greater prosperity of Jews than Hispanics in Hispanic countries throughout Latin America.

Female headed households are several times more common among blacks than among whites, and in both groups these are the lowest income families. Moreover, the proportion of people working differs greatly from group to group. More than three-fifths of all Japanese American families have multiple income earners while only about a third of Puerto Rican families do. Nor is this a purely socio-economic phenomenon, as distinguished from a cultural phenomenon. Blacks have similar incomes to Puerto Ricans, but the proportion of black families with a woman working is nearly three times that among Puerto Ricans. None of this disproves the existence of discrimination, nor is that its purpose.

Data collected for several American ethnic groups, and going back several decades, show that youngsters of Mexican, Chinese, American Indian, and Puerto Rican ancestry scored just as high (or higher) on tests when they went to schools that were virtually all of their own group as they scored in society at large.

With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies… Much of the literature on women shows little relationship between its evidence and its conclusions. “Landmark legislation and government action prohibiting employment discrimination based on sex” is credited by a U.S. Department of Labor study with increasing the labor force participation rates of women– even though the data in the very same study shows this to be a long-run trend going back at least as far as 1940.

The increase in the general participation of women in the labor force at all levels has little correlation with civil rights or the women’s liberation movement. The rising labor force participation rates of women in general, and of working mothers in particular, goes back at least as far as 1940. Nor has the rate of increase accelerated from 1960 to 1970, compared to its increase from 1950 to 1960– even though the decade of the 1960s marked the rise of women’s liberation as well as the civil rights revolution. On the contrary, the 1950-1960 increase was slightly greater– and that from 1940 to 1950 much higher still.

What is at issue is whether statistical differences mean discrimination, or whether there are innumerable demographic, cultural, and geographic differences that make this crucial automatic inference highly questionable.

Many who perceive the ineffective or counter-productive aspects of preferential policies nevertheless hesitate to “go back” to the world that existed prior to the civil rights revolution. Yet that is a false choice. No one could “go back” even if they wanted to… What is lacking in many discussions of discrimination is a sense of economics… Sweeping Jim Crow laws were used in the South to keep blacks “in their place” precisely because of the futility of trying to do so in a competitive economy… From an economic point of view, to say that any group is systematically underpaid or systematically denied as much credit as they deserve is the same as saying that an opportunity for unusually high profit exists for anyone who will hire or lend to them. When Japanese American farmers began bidding for underpaid Japanese American laborers in the early twentieth century, white farmers had no choice but to join the bidding war rather than lose good workers… Third-generation Mexican Americans earn 20 percent higher incomes than first-generation Mexican Americans of the same age, though it is doubtful if most employers seek the genealogical information necessary to make such a distinction.

Sincerity of purpose is not the same as honesty of procedure. Too often they are opposites… If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, Thomas Sowell, 1984, http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Rights-Rhetoric-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0688062695.

Walter Williams is an African American Ph.D. economist from George Mason University.

Coupled with dramatic breakdown in the black-family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black rate was only 19 percent in 1940, but skyrocketed in the late 1960s, reaching 49 percent in 1975. As of 2000, black illegitimacy stood at 68 percent and in some cities over 80 percent… Several studies point to welfare programs as a major contributor to several aspects of behavioral poverty. One of these early studies was the Seattle/Denver Experiment… Among its findings: for each dollar increase to welfare payments, low-income persons reduced labor earning by eighty cents… Ann Hill and June O’Neill found that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of welfare benefits led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.

Gross historical discrimination alone has never been sufficient to prevent blacks from earning a living and bettering themselves by working as skilled or unskilled craftsmen and as business owners, accumulating considerable wealth. The fact that whites sought out blacks as artisans and workers, while patronizing black businesses, can hardly be said to be a result of white enlightenment. A far better explanation: market forces at work. The relative color blindness of the market accounts for much of the hostility towards it. Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures. White customers patronized black-owned businesses because their prices were lower or their product quality or service better. Whites hired black skilled and unskilled labor because their wages were lower or they made superior employees.

As will be argued in subsequent chapters, restrictive laws harm blacks equally, whether they were written with the explicit intent– as in the past– to eliminate black competition or written– as in our time– with such benign goals as protecting public health, safety and welfare, and preventing exploitation of workers.

Some might find it puzzling that during the times of gross racial discrimination, black unemployment was lower and blacks were more active in the labor market than they are today… In 1970, 71 percent… In the early 1900′s, coal mining companies competed vigorously for black workers… Those observations cannot be explained simply by racial tastes. Surely one cannot explain the fact of higher black employment rates during earlier periods as a product of less racial discrimination.

Numerous laws, regulations, and ordinances have reduced or eliminated avenues of upward mobility for many blacks. The most common feature of these barriers is that they prevent people from making voluntary transactions that are deemed mutually advantageous by the transactors themselves… [Blacks] were the last major ethnic group to become urbanized and gain basic civil rights. When they finally achieved that status, blacks found that new barriers had been erected.

A reader might be compelled to ask what can be done to help. My answer would be similar to that given by abolitionist Frederick Douglass [in 1865], “What the Black Man Wants,” and in it, Douglass said:

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for trying to fasten them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall.

And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone– your interference is doing him a positive injury.

Race and Economics, Walter Williams, 2011, http://www.amazon.com/Race-Economics-Blamed-Discrimination-PUBLICATION/dp/0817912452.

Title II… Beginning in 1960 sit-ins and other Gandhi-style confrontations were desegregating department-store lunch counters throughout the South. No laws had to be passed or repealed. Social pressure—the public shaming of bigots—was working.

Even earlier, during the 1950s, David Beito and Linda Royster Beito report in Black Maverick, black entrepreneur T.R.M. Howard led a boycott of national gasoline companies that forced their franchisees to allow blacks to use the restrooms from which they had long been barred.

The social campaign for equality that was desegregating the South was transmogrified when it was diverted to Washington. Focus then shifted from the grassroots to a patronizing white political elite in Washington that had scurried to the front of the march and claimed leadership. Recall Hillary Clinton’s belittling of the grassroots movement when she ran against Barack Obama: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964…. It took a president to get it done.”

We will never know how the original movement would have evolved—what independent mutual-aid institutions would have emerged—had that diversion not occurred.

Libertarians need not shy away from the question, “Do you mean that whites should have been allowed to exclude blacks from their lunch counters?” Libertarians can answer proudly, “No. They should not have been allowed to do that. They should have been stopped—not by the State, which can’t be trusted, but by nonviolent social action on behalf of equality.”

The libertarian answer to bigotry is community organizing.

Context-Keeping and Community Organizing, Sheldon Richman, June 18th, 2010, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/18/sheldon-richman/context-keeping-and-community-organizing/.